INGLE: A.G. has no limit on spending your tax money

Gov. Chris Christie is on a rant to get the Legislature to renew a law limiting raises for many firefighters and police officers, but his own attorney general doesn’t seem to give a damn about caps when it comes to spending your tax money.

Trying to regain momentum lost when events commonly referred to as Bridgegate hit the spotlight, the governor has taken to the town hall trail. At the top of his discussion list is a now-expired law passed in 2010 that limits arbitration awards for police and firefighters to an average of 2 percent a year.

An extension was passed in March that would keep it in force until the end of 2017, but there were loopholes such as raising the cap to 3 percent in towns that saved money through increased employee payments for health benefits.

Christie conditionally vetoed the extension bill, changing it to roughly what the expired law required. The state Senate concurred. The Assembly didn’t. Its new speaker, Vincent Prieto, seems to be paying a lot of attention to special interests.

Christie is not alone in favoring an extension of the 2 percent cap. Mayors across New Jersey credit the law with helping them keep property tax hikes to 2 percent overall.

While the governor is moving about the state urging voters to tell Prieto to get with the program and do something for overburdened property-tax payers, in Trenton his acting attorney general, John Hoffman, has been moving in the other direction.

The Governor’s Office hired the law firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher — at $640 an hour — to help with subpoenaed documents and to do an internal investigation. The legal team produced a voluminous report that basically cleared Christie of any wrongdoing in Bridgegate while suggesting that Bridget Kelly, a former deputy chief of staff to Christie, possibly took part because a personal relationship ended.

It was universally panned as amateurish and might have been one of the more humorous reads of the year, except it was paid for with your tax money. How much taxpayer money? The New York Times estimated the law firm would be paid more than $1 million.

Enter Hoffman. He said he doesn’t know what it will cost because no bills have been submitted. But more than that: There is no cap on what it can spend. What kind of responsible administrator enters into an agreement like that?

It gets worse. Hoffman hired five law firms at $340 an hour to represent at least five current or former state officials caught up in Bridgegate. Hoffman would not say how many people are billing the state for legal fees or who is getting public funds for private attorneys.

Why? Confidentiality, Hoffman says.

If Bill Stepien, who was in the deputy chief of staff job before Kelly, is one of them, I can understand why what he tells his attorney is confidential. What I don’t get is why the taxpayers who are paying for that attorney can’t be told whose representation they are paying for.

This kind of thing is costing Christie credibility and limiting future prospects. He was supposed to be different. The state Attorney General’s Office has long been an overstaffed joke. They can save some money by replacing the A.G. with someone whose job is to hire outside lawyers, perhaps a recent grad who passed the contracts course in law school.

Bob Ingle is senior political columnist for the State House Bureau. Reach him at bingle@app.com.